A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

alackaday

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An exclamation of grief, regret, or dismay; a more emphatic form of “alack.”

Detailed Definition
“Alackaday” (from “alack the day!”) was a common interjection in Early Modern English drama and poetry, expressing sorrow or lamentation. Its melodramatic tone suits tragic or elegiac modes, allowing poets to externalize deep emotion through heightened speech. Though now obsolete, it persists in literary allusion and pastiche to signal antique pathos or mock-exaggerated despair in satirical contexts.
Example
Example in poetry:
Alackaday! My rose hath withered on the stem; Alackaday, the golden age is turned to dust; He cried “Alackaday!” as dreams fled on black wings; Alackaday! The wellspring of my joy runs dry
Additional Notes
“Alackaday” (also “alack-a-day”) is an intensified form of the interjection “alack,” itself derived from “alack the day!” It expresses deep sorrow, regret, or lamentation, and was standard in Early Modern English drama and lyric poetry. Shakespeare uses it in “The Taming of the Shrew” (“Alackaday! I will not touch it”), and it appears frequently in elegies and soliloquies to signal emotional rupture. The term’s melodramatic tone suits tragic or exaggerated modes, and its triple-syllable structure fits naturally into trochaic or iambic lines with a caesura. For modern poets, it offers a period-appropriate way to channel antique pathos without modern psychological realism. Related exclamations include “woe is me,” “alas,” and “fie,” all part of the emotional lexicon of Renaissance verse.
Also Known As
alas alack
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